Bill: I've got to give kudos to Ubuntu. These folks continue to be
the one to beat, year after year. I've been using Ubuntu since it was
no-name-yet.com, and it's just gotten better with each release.

Kyle: I have to agree with the readers on
this one too. Despite the hype
and anti-hype, Ubuntu still is a fine overall distribution both on the
desktop and as a server, and it's the one I generally recommend.

Readers:
best mobile OS:
Google Android; honorable mention: MeeGo.

Bill: Android really is the heavy hitter in the Linux mobile space
today. More and more phones are shipping with Android. I never
thought I'd see the day when my sister used a Linux device daily—pretty
cool stuff.

Kyle: Even though I'm not a huge fan of Android myself, I do have to
agree with the readers here at least on the point that Android has gotten
Linux into way more people's hands (and pockets) than just about
anything else. That said, I still prefer the extra flexibility and power
that Maemo (and hopefully MeeGo) brings to mobile devices.

Readers:
best desktop environment: GNOME and KDE (tie).

Bill: GNOME wins here for me, hands down. Part of it is just sheer muscle
memory, but the simplified elegant interface of GNOME appeals to me more
than all the knobs and switches of KDE.

Kyle: I thought it was very interesting that this landed as a tie this
year, and honestly I think I'm with the readers on this, except that to me,
the actual desktop environment doesn't really matter very much anymore. I
do use GNOME at the moment, but mostly because it was the default desktop
environment on my system. I generally disable or just plain don't use
most of the GNOME features on my desktop. I use terminals and a Web
browser for everything I need, so if Ubuntu decided tomorrow it would
default to KDE, I suppose I'd be a KDE user then.

Readers: best Web browser:
Firefox;
honorable mention: Chrome.

Bill: I've got to side with the crowd here, Firefox still beats Chrome
and every other browser for me. The plethora of plugins, ubiquity
and the fact that I've been using it forever make it my go-to browser.

Kyle: It turns out I agree with Bill here. I still prefer Firefox
myself. I know that vimperator-like plugins do exist for Chrome; however, I
not only like the wide variety of plugins that Firefox has, but I also think
it's important for a company like Google to have a viable open-source
competitor, especially when you consider all the valuable marketing
data that can be had in a user's browser history.

Kyle:
I won't rehash our past column on mutt vs. Thunderbird, but I have to admit I was
disappointed not to see mutt make the list. I mean, I don't even count
Gmail as a Linux e-mail client any more than I would count Yahoo or
Hotmail. It should be no surprise to anyone who has read my column that
I think mutt beats all of these clients hands- (and mice-) down.

Readers:
best IM client:
Pidgin; honorable mention: Skype.

Bill: I'm glad to see Pidgin beat Skype.
I've got an allergy to Skype—Kyle's seen it: hives, itching, the
whole bit. Seriously though,
Pidgin's open-source, cross-platform, modular approach to IM makes it
a winner for most of us.

Kyle: Skype, the Sun—Bill has a lot of allergies it turns out. I
understand why Pidgin got the win in this category, but I have to say I
prefer BitlBee for all my IM needs. Really nothing compares to being
able to treat IM like just another IRC channel inside my favorite IRC
client (more on that next).

Readers: best IRC client:
Pidgin; honorable mention: XChat.

Bill: Here's where I disagree with the
crowd. Pidgin's IM-style
interface really gives me fits when I try to use it as an IRC
client. I'd
much rather use XChat or Irssi, and I do, in fact, use both, although I
spend more time on Irssi as I can leave it running in a screen session.

Kyle: Wow, Bill agrees with me on a console application over a GUI
one! Like with mutt, once you get over the initial learning curve,
Irssi really is the best IRC client. Like Bill, I leave Irssi running
inside a screen session, so I can reconnect to it from wherever I happen
to be. The fact that an IM client like Pidgin can connect to IRC is neat,
I guess, but I think all the other straight IRC clients do it better.

Readers:
best audio player: Amarok; honorable mention: RhythmBox.

Bill: Where's the love for XMMS? Seriously, the last time I actually
listened to music on the computer instead of a mobile MP3 player, I
was using XMMS. I guess I'm becoming a greybeard in some things.

Kyle: I'll be honest, I don't really listen to music from apps on my computer
anymore. For years, I've used either a portable media player (which
is now my N900) or possibly my home XBMC machine to play music. That
being said, despite its complexity, I still prefer Amarok over
RhythmBox. I keep a very tidy nested directory structure for my music,
and I like it when it's simple to browse an actual directory structure
instead of relying on fickle ID3 tags.

Readers:
best media player:
VLC; honorable mention: MPlayer.

Bill: I side with the MPlayer crowd here. I've traditionally just had
better success with it, and it's kind of the Swiss Army knife of media.

Kyle: VLC always has seemed needlessly complex when you want to do more
than play an .avi. It's nice to have around as a sanity check if a video
doesn't play on something else, but to me, it's hard to beat the power
and speed of MPlayer. It plays just about anything I've thrown at it
and always seems to make the most of my resources.

Bill: I'm torn here. I like the cloud-based stuff, but I'd never dream
of putting my business' documentation on Google Docs. I'd have to make
this a split decision: Google Docs for personal documentation, and
wikis for business documentation.

Kyle: Wow, this category made Bill question his long-held love affair
with the cloud. I suppose I prefer wikis over Google Docs. I just don't
use a lot of cloud offerings, Google or otherwise, so I'd prefer to use
tools that I can conceivably run and control 100% myself.

Bill: I'm a huge fan of Dropbox and use it
daily. So for personal use,
I'd definitely say it's the best solution. However, if I were running a
business and needed cloud storage, I'd look at Amazon's S3.

Kyle: My favorite cloud-based file storage is my own file server. If
you have Linux and a few disks, it's trivial to rsync files around
to whatever machine you are in front of. Granted, some of these other
offerings might have more automated features, but I'd like to see the
Open Source community provide something that made it easy for people to
have these same capabilities on their own machines without relying on
some third-party outside their control.

Bill: This is a tough one, as I don't play
many games, but I'd have to
side with Doom, simply because of nostalgia.

Kyle: This is a tough one
for me too, because I'm torn between Frozen Bubble and
Quake 3. Doom is fun,
but these days, it's become the game version of Hello World that
everyone ports to a new Linux device. I guess I'll go with Quake
3. Yes,
it's an old FPS, but it's still my favorite.

Readers:
best database:
MySQL;
honorable mention: PostgreSQL.

Bill: MySQL wins for me. It's just too easy to get a database up and
running with it.

Kyle: Although MySQL is nice, I prefer PostgreSQL both for its power
and the fact that it's still nice to have some sort of
alternative to Oracle. These days, it really isn't any more difficult to
manage MySQL than PostgreSQL

Readers:
best backup solution:
rsync;
honorable mention: tar.

Bill: I have to go with tar on this one,
because when I hear “backup”,
I think “tape”, and tar stands for Tape Archive. rsync's got
its place,
and I use it a lot to copy data from point A to B, but it feels like
more of a copy utility rather than a backup solution.

Kyle: I'm going to have to go with BackupPC here. It's relatively easy
to set up, easy to manage and works well. Plus, you have the option to use
either rsync or tar for your backups. It seems like a win-win to me.

Bill: I did a virtualization shootout last year, and VMware came out
on top at the time. Now, I'm not so sure. VirtualBox has come a long way. I'm
split on this one.

Kyle: I think the main thing VirtualBox has going for it is the ease at
which it installs within distributions like Ubuntu. I just hope Oracle
doesn't kill it. On the enterprise end, I favor VMware's enterprise
products first and probably KVM second.

Bill: WordPress: it's ubiquitous, easy to
install and maintain, and it gets
out of your way and lets you create content. What can be better than that?

Kyle: I'm with Bill on this one. Drupal is powerful but has a significant
learning curve. It's dead simple to set up a site on WordPress, and
plenty of support and packages are available to make it easy to
maintain long-term.

Readers:
best Linux laptop vendor:
Dell;
honorable mention: Lenovo.

Bill: I own quite a few laptops, both Dell and Lenovo, but when I spec
a new machine, it's always a Lenovo system. The build quality still
is a cut above Dell, despite the leaps and bounds that Dell has improved in
the past few years. Besides, how many laptops have holes in the lower
case to allow Mountain Dew to drain out?

Kyle: This is tough, because although Lenovo doesn't do the best job of
championing Linux as a pre-installed option like some of the other
vendors, I've found its Linux support (especially for the ThinkPad
series) is very solid. I've said for a while now that if you want good
Linux support, you should get the same hardware the developers use,
and it seems there are plenty of Linux developers on ThinkPads.

Readers:
best brand of video chipset:
NVIDIA;
honorable mention: ATI.

Bill: It's rare that I do any 3-D at all, so graphics simply need to be
there, have stable drivers and not use a lot of power. That's why I
like the Intel graphics chipsets.

Kyle: Although like Bill, I can
handle my 3-D acceleration needs with
my onboard Intel graphics card, the VDPAU support in the NVIDIA cards
that allows you to offload decoding of HD video content to your graphics
card pushes NVIDIA to the top of my list.

Bill: I've spent time with the Motorola
Droid, and
it was a very pleasant experience. I don't run a Droid as my daily phone,
but if I were stuck with one, I wouldn't mind terribly. It's a nice unit.

Kyle: The readers are right on with this one. The N900 is the phone I
carry with me, and I'd argue is definitely the best Linux smartphone out
there. Sure, some phones have more processing power these days,
but it's hard to beat the openness and variety of development languages
that the Maemo platform has on the N900.

Bill: The Kindle is the gadget to beat in this space. They're very nice,
though the unmentioned Barnes & Noble's Nook is a good alternative (see my
review of the Nook on page 48).

Kyle: This is tough for me, as I look at all the Linux-based gadgets
around my house. I think the Spykee, the Pogoplug, the N900 and the
Parrot AR drone are all very interesting Linux-based gadgets. But, I still
think I'm going to have to go with my N900.

Readers:
product of the year:
Android;
honorable mention: KDE.

Bill: I have to agree with the readers:
Android deserves product of the year. Not only are countless people now
running Linux, but also Android's technical achievements can make their way
back into mainline Linux over time and improve the entire Linux ecosystem.
I'm looking forward to seeing ARM-based, Android-powered Netbooks in the
next year.

Kyle: As I mentioned previously, I'm not a
big Android fan, but I do agree that it should be product of the year. It
has dramatically increased the number of people using Linux, even if they
don't know it, and it has great potential to increase Linux's reach in the
future.

Kyle Rankin is a Systems Architect in the San Francisco Bay Area and the
author of a number of books, including The Official Ubuntu Server
Book,
Knoppix Hacks and Ubuntu Hacks.
He is currently the president of the North
Bay Linux Users' Group.

Bill Childers is an IT Manager in Silicon Valley, where he lives with his
wife and two children. He enjoys Linux far too much, and he probably
should
get more sun from time to time. In his spare time, he does work with the
Gilroy Garlic Festival, but he does not smell like garlic.

Kyle Rankin is a director of engineering operations in the San Francisco Bay Area, the author of a number of books including DevOps Troubleshooting and The Official Ubuntu Server Book, and is a columnist for Linux Journal.

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